Two opposing hypotheses were proposed to explain the life course pattern in the effect of education on mortality: “cumulative advantage,” where the education effect becomes stronger with age, and “age-as-leveler,” where the effect becomes weaker in old age. Most empirical studies bring evidence for the latter hypothesis, but the observed convergence of mortality patterns could be an artifact of selective mortality due to unobserved heterogeneity. A simulation shows that unobserved heterogeneity can bias the estimated effect of education downward so that the cohort-average effect of education decreases in old age regardless of the shape of the underlying subject-specific trajectory.

中文翻译：

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未观察到的异质性可能会混淆教育对死亡率的影响


提出了两个相反的假设来解释教育对死亡率影响的生命历程模式：“累积优势”，即教育效应随着年龄的增长而增强；“年龄均衡”，即教育效应在老年时变弱。大多数实证研究都为后一种假设提供了证据，但观察到的死亡率模式的趋同可能是由于未观察到的异质性而造成的选择性死亡率的人为因素。模拟表明，未观察到的异质性可能会使教育的估计效果向下偏差，因此，无论潜在的特定学科轨迹的形状如何，教育的队列平均效果在老年时都会下降。